Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, occurring mostly in regions with high economic performance, especially North America, Northern Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe, etc. Nowadays the incidence of breast cancer is increasing due to changes in living environment and eating habits. Thus early-stage diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer have become an important public health issue.
Breast cancer screening test available now includes mammography. By using low-energy X-rays, abnormalities in the breast in the form of the smallest to less than 5 mm (zero stage) and calcium spots can be detected and breast cancer at zero stage without symptoms is found out. Yet the mammography has its limitations. About 15 percent of breast cancer goes undetected by mammography. The test cost is high and bulky test equipment is required. Thus people are unable to perform exams at home. Another test method is breast ultrasound. It is much better to monitor the breast tumor through ultrasound; however, the heavy test equipment is still required and thus people are unable to do tests at home.
Breast cancer staging means looking at the tumor size and whether the tumor has spread to the nearby lymph nodes or other parts of the body. If the breast cancer is detected at early stages, breast conserving surgery is an option and 5-year survival rate is up to 90%. Once the detection method can be simplified, the early-stage breast cancer can be found out easier, and the survival rate of the patients with breast cancer can be further increased.
Now scientists have found that Lysyl oxidase homolog 2 (Lysyl oxidase-like 2, LOXL2) enzyme is associated with invasiveness and metastasis in breast cancer. It has also found that blocking the LOXL2 enzyme significantly slowed the spread of breast cancer. The researchers inhibited the activity of the LOXL2 gene in mice with breast cancer. Thus the spread of tumor cells to distant areas in the body is effectively prevented. Thereby new drugs that inhibit LOXL2 enzyme have been developed to treat breast cancer. In the field of cancer detection, whether LOXL2-related mechanism can be applied to simplify a flow chart of breast cancer detection also has become a hot issue.